The chapter argues that although the two competing understandings of the ‘problem’ of sugar set out in Chapter 1 appear inimical to one another, they manage to hang together in pursuit of their shared investment in sugar reduction. It argues that this is achieved via the discursive mobilisation of the obesity epidemic, addiction and nostalgia for a lost dietary past. Together, these offer a capacious lowest-common-denominator platform which is able to accommodate multiple understandings of the problem at hand, while simultaneously keeping the focus tightly on sugar, enabling a strategic consensus to form. The chapter concludes that although ‘What’s wrong with sugar?’ is a good starting point, it may be the wrong question all along.

This final chapter will draw the various threads of the book together and reflect on them in the light of current debates around Research Ethics Committee (REC) review. This chapter will explore how many of the historical challenges raised by REC practice (for example, the geographical variation in approval rates resulting from autonomous, local committees or the review of scientific quality of applications) are still subject to considerable debate on the part of policy makers and how the proposed responses – because they fail to engage with the central role of trust – run the risk of undermining REC decision making. The chapter then sets out three specific insights – around REC membership, the regulation of risk, and street-level bureaucracies – that arise from the book as a whole.

One unusual aspect of UK NHS Research Ethics Committees (RECs) is that, for at least the past decade, it has been standard practice to invite applicants into committee meetings to answer questions about their proposed research and the ethical issues it might raise. This chapter explores the role of meeting people face to face in trust decisions to examine the crucial role of such attendance.Historically, this chapter examines the policy decisions in the early 2000s to expand invitations to applicants which were typically seen as an idiosyncratic practice on the part of a small number of RECs (in Wales and London, for example) at the request of the pharmaceutical industry (which saw such attendance as increasing the efficiency of ethics review).The ethnographic component of this chapter draws on observations and REC members’ discussions of such attendances, exploring those aspects of applicants’ demeanour and response to questions – their ‘presentation of self’ – that persuade or dissuade RECs to approve their applications. As part of this, the chapter will explore the way in which RECs interpret applicants’ characteristics (for example, arrogance in response to questions) in terms of how research participants will be treated as well as the kinds of knowledge-based resources (about clinical practice for example) that are hard to articulate in a written application, but which applicants can draw on to persuade RECs that they are trustworthy.

This chapter brings together the concerns of border aesthetics and ‘post-national’ imagology. Setting out to map images of Northernness in contemporary migrant literature that features viewpoints originating from the global ‘South’, it discusses the border processes implied by stereotypical images of the other and of the self. It addresses a number of fictional or autobiographical public narratives written in Norwegian by migrants arriving in Norway as children or young adults, including testimonial narratives by the child refugee Amal Aden and ‘illegal’ migrant Maria Amelie, along with semi-autobiographical novels by Romeo Gill and Sara Azmeh Rasmussen. Migrant narratives negotiate discourses of arcticity, winterliness, nordicity etc., known from imagological research on Northernness. The chapter asks to what degree various topoi of Northernness contribute to the bordering processes in the texts, or whether these narratives produce new images of Northernness and new vocabularies for addressing the border-crossing. The narratives deploy chiastic switchings between North and South, circling disorientations, entropic white-outs and liberating and destructive verticalities in order to figure the border in new ways at different points of their physical and symbolic journeys. The ambivalence of these images shows that they are related not merely to borders but also to the epistemological borders negotiated.

The chapter shows how migrant writers from 1950 to 2013 have addressed their border-crossing into the city of London, their experience of migration within that city, and their ‘burden of representation’ of themselves in Britain and Europe at large. It focuses on displacement in border-crossing narratives, as well as on migrant writers’ use of aesthetic strategies peculiar to border narratives (e.g., threshold) and border figures (e.g., passage). The first section addresses the border-crossing narrative as a cultural expression for a community of ‘black writers and artists’ such as George Lamming, Sam Selvon, Caryl Phillips, and Hanif Kureishi. The second section focuses on the play Routes by the British playwright Rachel De-lahay by examining the aesthetic representation of ‘the British Isles’ in the shifting context of migration, borders and power that has emerged in the wake of the migrant crisis. The final section revisits the idea of the threshold to explore the migrant’s border-crossing into Europe, across the Mediterranean, and, following De Genova, argues for a need to create a ‘politics of presence’ where the migrant’s visibility and voice are accepted in the public sphere.

In this chapter we provide an in-depth discussion of the main concepts and ideas on which the book is based. We start out with an outline of the historical background, where we look at movements and critical events in European and world history which led to change in both geo-political and ideological/conceptual borders. We move on to a conceptual discussion of borders and border regimes where among other themes we discuss how borders can be both hard militarised places and porous grey spaces, and both physical and imagined sites. This develops into an examination of ways that borders as territorial frontiers and boundaries as internal categorisations are closely aligned, and how these structural and ideological parallels operate in tandem both for those who cross borders and also for citizens within those borders. We explore these parallels in relation to regimes of intimate care, concepts of moral economy, entitlement and ‘deserving-ness’, and processes of reproduction of both persons and domains.

On the hundreds of northern soul nights in venues ranging from the plush nightclubs of the Mecca chain through to the historic halls of miners’ institutes and working-men’s clubs it formed part of a wider working-class culture that in Britain had across the twentieth century danced to the sounds of black America. This was an exciting scene to be part of, whether it involved being in the crowd waiting in anticipation for the doors of Wigan Casino to open, ascending the escalator to the Highland Room at Blackpool Mecca, or watching Cleethorpes Pier seemingly about to take off into the night sky over the North Sea, such was the energy and sound it generated. It was a vibrant scene that has been described as the ‘revenge of the small town’. Yet its impact and reach went way beyond its parochial foundations, having an influence on subsequent youth subcultures and musical genres.

The chapter analyses how specific transnational care practices are reflected in the personal life trajectories of women from Ukraine and former Yugoslavia with migration and refugee experience in the postsocialist context of contemporary Czech Republic. The focus of the chapter is on the influence of gendered norms and expectations on women’s transnational care practices and their feelings of care obligation, and it explores the women’s specific coping strategies for dealing with practical and emotional challenges arising at the juncture of contradictory expectations. These are: a) guilt over ’leaving behind’, b) a strategy of temporariness, and c) struggles to achieve a work–care combination within broader family structures in the transnational environment. The research findings show how geographical borders shape the life trajectories of transnational mothers and daughters, enabling the women to live parallel lives in a transnational space, where they move back and forth between their reproductive and productive roles. The borders of nation states determine their legal status as ‘third-country nationals’ who have limited opportunities for family reunification with their children or parents and thus have to search for alternative ways and strategies to fulfil socially expected gender roles.

This chapter examines the representation of forced migration in the recent short story collection Breach (2016) by the Nigerian German writer Olumide Popoola and the Southern African author Annie Holmes. Focusing on fictional narratives telling of forced migrants travelling towards and inhabiting the originally temporary and notorious refugee camp known as the ‘Jungle’ on the outskirts of Calais, France, the collection addresses migration to Europe and Britain as part of contemporary global mobility. In addition to charactering the fictional space as a borderscape where identities are formed and negotiated, the chapter goes beyond a thematic analysis to suggest that the form of the collection, the short story composite, is a way of narrating the borderscape since it both unites the stories, functioning as the site where cultural encounters charactering its various migrant–host encounters take place, but also underlines the characters’ diverse affiliations and transforming identities, their belongings and becomings, unique to each story and individual. By challenging acts of bordering and refusing to fix the identities of the subjects narrated, Breach shows that the borderscape is full of ambiguity and precariousness, but it may also offer glimpses of a better future and a sense of community.